Cravings for Pelmeni, a recipe

I had to have some pelmeni today. Luckily I remember learning how to make them when I was younger. Pelmeni is a delightful culinary item from Russia. They are usually made in big batches and frozen in winter times. What you need for pelmenis is a kind of pasta dough and a filling. The filling can be basically any kind of meat, fish etc. I prepare mine with minced pork meat.

Sebastian's Pelmeni recipe

Dough:

• 200ml water
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 300g flour

Filling:

• 400g minced meat
• 1 onion
• spices and salt according to taste

Make sure you chop the onion finely. Finer the onion is chopped the better it will mix with the minced meat. Mix the ingredients of the filling well. I seasoned the filling with some thyme, cumin(geerah), hint of paprika, some cayenne pepper, white pepper, black pepper and salt. You can check the taste of the filling raw or you can fry a tiny bit of it on a pan to get a more accurate tasting.

Prepare the dough as you would make pasta. You don't need to let the dough rest. It's ready as soon as you're done punishing it. Knead the dough into submission. It will have better consistence that way and won't puncture easily.

You can use a rolling pin to flatten and roll the dough over and over again.

Flatten the dough as much as you can and make circles out of it. Turning it over from time to time and flattening it with a rolling pin allows you to get it thinner faster. Find something round you can use to cut the circles. I used the lid of my coffee maker. If the circles are too small you can use the rolling pin to make them larger. Stretching by hand(like you stretch pizza) works for me.

Take some of the seasoned meat and put it on the center of the circle that you have placed sticky side up.

Fold and pinch to close and make a half circle with filling inside. Bend and pinch the opposite ends of the half circle together.

You can boil the leftover dough as thin strips to get a homemade pasta. I like to thwow it into the freezer and use it later.

Boil in salted water. Raw pelmeni will sink to the bottom. They're about done when they float. Bigger pelmenis might need a bit more time to boil even after they've started floating.

Serve with smetana and freshly chopped chives or parsley.

Prijatnovo appetita!!

Reballing an XBOX 360 with RROD

So you got the infamous red ring of death. Instead of murdering your home entertainment device with a heat gun you might want to check out this video series of howto fix the problem by reballing the GPU. This requires a reflow oven or a skillet.

Eggdrop commands

I'm always having trouble trying to remember the same eggdrop commands. All I want to do from time to time is to manage some hostmasks so that eggdrop will automagically op those users. The command reference has way too many commands to go through every time so here's a little reminder of the two commands I always end up searching:

+host <nickname> <hostmask>

Adds a hostmask to a user's record on the bot. The hostmasks are where the bot will identify that user from. Usually you will not need to use this command since a user can add hostmasks to their own record via the /msg ident command, but it's here if you need it.

channel [channel-name]

Lists channel info and user settings including their hosts

egghelp.org: eggdrop command reference

Howto reroute your network traffic

Howto reroute traffic through a client inside a private network in case of an emergency? I was just in such a situation where I had to ask that question and come to an answer also. In other words, my broadband went down.

Ingredients:

• 1 USB dongle

Time to cook: 5 minutes

I have a computer in my network called kiwi that has the ip 192.168.1.120 and normally connects with interface eth2 to the LAN and to internet through tomato-router(192.168.1.1) on said LAN

I don't know how to do these things in fancy GUIs so here's some command line magic

sudo su
ip route
192.168.1.0/24 dev eth2 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.120 metric 1
10.64.64.64 dev ppp0 proto kernel scope link src 85.78.143.39
default via 192.168.1.1 dev eth2 proto static

ip route del default
ip route add default via 10.64.64.64 dev ppp0  proto static
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -A FORWARD -o ppp0 -i eth2 -s 192.168.1.0/24 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE

Finally I needed to add a static route to my tomato-router
Destination 0.0.0.0, Gateway: 192.168.1.120, Subnet Mask: 0.0.0.0, Metric: 0
Now my entire network was able to connect to the internet almost as well(dongle prone to overheating when transferring data) as it had before my broadband went down

My ISP, not connecting people

There was yet another interruption in my broadband services today due to "hardware malfunction". According to Jari Kauhanen commenting on TurunKaapelitelevisio facebook page, this malfunction appeared while updating some systems. I have no confirmation whether or not this actually was the case. If they were updating systems I wonder why not set up IPv6 networking once and for all. As far as I know TDC is already capable of providing native IPv6 connectivity for them.

Turun Kaapelitelevisio was acquired by Sonera a while ago. I feared I would notice a decline in the quality of service. I really do hope that this is just a glitch the will fix asap. Traceroute shows that they still use TDC as their ISP, so no changes in that part.

a reverse traceroute to my host

traceroute to 92.242.171.98 (92.242.171.98), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 194.79.19.1 (194.79.19.1) 0.163 ms 0.245 ms 0.207 ms
2 * * *
3 tdc.ficix1.ficix.fi (193.110.226.36) 0.486 ms 0.581 ms 0.559 ms
4 62.237.135.64 (62.237.135.64) 38.375 ms 38.577 ms 38.671 ms
5 62.237.135.65 (62.237.135.65) 2.680 ms 2.764 ms 2.929 ms
6 98-171.turkunet.fi (92.242.171.98) 9.228 ms 13.319 ms 13.299 ms

I can tell you it's no fun rerouting your entire network through an overheat usb-dongle(HUAWEI E367) prone to overheating, 4G or not.

Image1: Performance of my 100M/5M broadband 18. August 2011
Computer attached directly to cable modem and downloading a dvd from multiple sources.

Update 20.8.2010

Performance is back to normal. As you may see from the pictures I'm using a different computer for measuring the speed. The other computer maxed out at 88M and was fluctuating too much.

Image2: Performance of my 100M/5M broadband 20. August 2011
Computer attached directly to cable modem and downloading a dvd from multiple sources.

I suspect the interruptions in downloading are due to aria2-downloader. It took 4m 44s to download a 2840MB dvd. Transfer speed was 9,99 MB/s or 80,00Mb/s